Love You More still - Keira

This is a still from 'Love You More' (see review below)

Similarities can be drawn between our film and this, although the themes explored and characters are entirely different.

Here is a still from our film:
This shows we are taking into consideration films we have seen, and using them to inform our own work.

Keira Smalley

Editing Process - Keira

We have edited the majority of our film, and as a group we feel it's gone well. In Adam's post were some screen grabs from what we'd done so far, and here are some more:

This is one of the closeups of Tom playing bass, that goes with the voice over when Kate says 'There's just something about him.' It is filmed in a rough shaky style (similar to that often used in 'Wasp') to both incorporate a traditional social realism and to show that it's like she's watching him.

This is one of the eating shots which goes with the voice over of Kate saying 'he eats...A LOT.' For this we are considering slowing the shot down so that there is more emphasis on how disgusting his eating is. Likewise, with the shots below, we have edited them so that the camera stays in the same place but Tom takes each piece of pizza straight after the other to suggest he's eating really fast. By changing the speed of the shots we would be breaking a convention of typical social realism, but it may improve our film by introducing some comedy. Many of the social realism shorts we've watched have been hybirds, including elements of other genres, so we believe it is justified to break this convention.

This shot goes with the voiceover of Kate saying 'And he even wears socks in bed.', which again (we hope) will bring some slight comedy for the audience. All these shots juxtapose the ones where Tom is talking about Kate (e.g. 'She's beautiful') because he is thinking about her good points and she is thinking about his bad points. This forms the basis to the idea of our film that relationships aren't simple.

In the editing process we have decided to include fades and dissolves, in some cases to show the passage of time and in some to make the shots flow together better. In this scene, Kate is lying on her bed writing in her diary about Tom and in the shot she changes positions while the camera stays in the same place - this tells the audience she's been writing for a long time. To the left is an example of our dissolve, this is a still from in between two shots. For the lighting here, Adam suggested we make the room darker and use one table lamp to light the scene so it looks like evening. This has worked well as a contrast to the other daytime shots.

We will continue editing in our frees, and need to start thinking about considerations for the voice over. We might have a few more shots to film, but that depends on how we feel having watched what we've done so far.

Keira Smalley

Screen grabs by ADAM RUTHERFORD

Just a few screengrabs from our film so far. This should hopefully give a good idea of the narrative were going on and also our usage of lighting and shots. More to come later

More Film Promotion - Keira

'Colin' (2008) from Nowhere Fast Productions is an extremely low-budget zombie horror that aims to make its viewers think by positioning them in sympathy with a member of the undead, Colin.
View the IMDb page here....

See the poster:

The film's promotion strongly features the fact that the film had such a low budget. If you can see underneath, the tag line for the whole film is 'the £45 zombie movie!' This draws people in as they want to see how effectively such a small amount can be used to make a film.

The choice of title is mocking of other zombie and horror films, as it's slightly humerous in the fact that it's just a normal name rather than following the same lines as 'Dawn of the Dead', 'Return of the Living Dead', 'Night of the Living Dead'...a clear pattern emerges. The choice of bold red font (connoting blood) juxtaposes the title which is another deivce to create intregue. The image (which is used in all the promotion and the DVD cover) is shocking enough to make people look, whilst also showing the non-mainstream concept with the lack of special effects (such as white eyes or other typical zombie features, see right). It puts accross the point that he looks like a normal human acting like a zombie, which again challenges our ideas of the genre.

Although our film is not horror, it is useful to examine any promotion (particularly that of such a low budget) to get more ideas of how to present our own poster.

Keira Smalley

Filming

On 11th February we filmed all the inside shots. As a group we feel this was successful as we completed the list of shots we needed and having watched them back on the camera, they seem to look good. One issue might be with the continuity in lighting from shots that are chronologically next to each other but we filmed at different parts of the day, and the light coming in from the window is different. If we feel this is noticeable when re-watching the shots on the computer, these can easily be re-filmed another day.
We were supposed to film the park shots on 18th February but the weather was inappropriate (heavy rain) so we decided to postpone until a day when we know the weather will be better.
We are definately filming on the 24th February for the in-college shots, so maybe this would be a good oppertunity to do the park ones as well.

We will post again after watching back our footage so far.

Considerations for the poster - Keira

We have started to think about possible imagery and information to be included in the poster, in order for it to best represent our short film. We have decided to keep it simple in design (as that seems to be a recurring feature of social realism posters) and hope to think of a catchy tagline to draw the audience in. We have also been considering posible fonts for the title ('Three Words') and the best we have found so far is here..., which is from dafont.com and is called 'Loverboy'. We felt it worked because it uses hearts to indicate the story is based on a relationship, whilst not being too fancy or pleasant, to indicate it's not necessarily all happy.

Keira Smalley

'Love You More' - film review - Keira

This is a review from the Guardian online of a short film called 'Love You More', directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, that won 'Best British Short' at the British Independent Film Awards.

The review talks of its premiere at the Hay film festival, saying it provided some 'much needed sunny optimism'.

Here's a still from the film:

I think reviews such as this will help me learn how to write in review-format and to use the appropriate language etc.

Keira Smalley